Record fine for William Hill Group

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Looking at these failings, they deserve every penny of that fine:

  • One person was allowed to open a new account and bet £32,500 over two days without any checks
  • The group failed to identify customers who were at risk of experiencing gambling related harm. In one instance, a customer lost £14,902 in 70 minutes
  • The group failed to apply a 24-hour delay between receiving requests for an increase in a credit limit and granting it. One customer was allowed to place a £100,000 bet immediately, even though he had a £70,000 credit limit
  • Customers were able to place large bets without sufficient checks on the source of the funds being carried out
  • The group failed to ask for source of funds evidence when one customer staked £19,000 in a single bet, and did the same in another case when a punter bet £39,324 and lost £20,360 over 12 days.
How can you claim to be responsible when you let clangers like that slip through the net? Utter incompetence.
 
Hit the nail firmly and squarely on the head Bamber. Thanks to the likes of William Hill and their failings, it just arms the anti gambling lobby and further causes problems for UK players, who find they have to jump through more and more hoops when playing online. This is aside to the individuals who they have personally been found to have failed!

However, whilst a record fine, this is a drop in the ocean to their ultimate parent company, 888 Holdings.
 
Thanks to the likes of William Hill and their failings
Fully agree, hence to focus on negative news like this should be avoided. We need to move the focus to those gambling companies not fined, while being assessed multiple times. Like us, L&L ;) let's write a new article
 
Looking at these failings, they deserve every penny of that fine:

  • One person was allowed to open a new account and bet £32,500 over two days without any checks
  • The group failed to identify customers who were at risk of experiencing gambling related harm. In one instance, a customer lost £14,902 in 70 minutes
  • The group failed to apply a 24-hour delay between receiving requests for an increase in a credit limit and granting it. One customer was allowed to place a £100,000 bet immediately, even though he had a £70,000 credit limit
  • Customers were able to place large bets without sufficient checks on the source of the funds being carried out
  • The group failed to ask for source of funds evidence when one customer staked £19,000 in a single bet, and did the same in another case when a punter bet £39,324 and lost £20,360 over 12 days.
How can you claim to be responsible when you let clangers like that slip through the net? Utter incompetence.
Excuse my ignorance but how to these people get those level of funds into their WH accounts in such a short period of time? I’ve just checked my WH account (which I haven’t used in a couple of years) and I have the default deposit limit of £500 per day.
 
Excuse my ignorance but how to these people get those level of funds into their WH accounts in such a short period of time? I’ve just checked my WH account (which I haven’t used in a couple of years) and I have the default deposit limit of £500 per day.

Exactly. It's complete and utter incompetence - no other way to describe it.

There is no excuse for not having systems that flag such behaviour and the processes in place to react accordingly, safeguarding the player and brand.

It amazes me that people keep their jobs after such epic failings.

p.s. It also begs the question - what does an operator need to do before losing their licence? if it had been a smaller outfit, would they have made an example out of them? Does the sheer size of William Hill and its influence on the UK market mean it gets a pass? Its mind-boggling to say the least, how a regulator and influential licensee come together to create such an illogical and unhelpful fiasco where the only losers are the punters again.
 
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Exactly. It's complete and utter incompetence - no other way to describe it.

There is no excuse for not having systems that flag such behaviour and the processes in place to react accordingly, safeguarding the player and brand.

It amazes me that people keep their jobs after such epic failings.
So the field that says daily deposit limit = £500 against my account is just a suggestion? So I could deposit £23,000 in one go if I tried?
 
So the field that says daily deposit limit = £500 against my account is just a suggestion? So I could deposit £23,000 in one go if I tried?

My guess is that these examples were not your average punter, and had some kind of manual override on deposit limits. I don't know enough about their systems but maybe these customers were loaded and came back with huge credit limits after checks.

Or, perhaps, some kind of account where the normal flags are not raised. I am sure William Hill will have put it down to a 'systems failure'.
 
The commission "seriously considered" suspending William Hill's licence.
Similar language to what they said to Entain when they got the then-record fine (£17m) from the UKGC for extensive - and repeated - violations. The only way companies will smarten up is if a big name has their license suspended - arguably Ladbrokes/Corals should have, arguably William Hill should have also.

£19m is a drop in the bucket when their online platforms have been making £100m+ a year (in isolation, their retail estates have been more volatile given the pandemic and ongoing industry reviews). Given how frequent these fines are now occurring - and the time for the UKGC to apply them (these incidents happened more than 2 years ago), it feels like we're into the "cost of doing business" phase - which isn't a good look for the UKGC.
 

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